Special thanks to this group’s participants: Brian C, Antti K, Kassim M, and Alec S! During the Fall 2016 PKP Sprint event in Fredericton, New Brunswick, one of the tasks we decided to work on was the development of a REST API for OJS 3.0. REST APIs are a perennial favourite subject — we’ve worked on this before at past events, and spoken with numerous users and partners in order to gather requirements for what the API should cover.

The aim of the OAuth group at the PKP Sprint 2016 in Fredericton was to provide the possibility for the users to log into the system using their credentials from other applications, e.g. using their ORCID, Google, or Facebook account. During the sprint a generic plugin was developed that allows users to log into OJS with their ORCID account. For the authentication with ORCID, the ORCID public API is used.

The latest webinar from the Library Publishing Coalition is OA Journal Publishing: DOAJ Indexing and Best Practice, featuring Judith Barnsby from the DOAJ. The webinar will be of interest to anyone wanting to get their open access journal indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and reviews the requirements for inclusion in DOAJ, and some best practice recommendations, including the criteria for the DOAJ Seal.

As part of PKP’s ongoing work to advance access to high quality research, Managing Director Brian Owen recently participated in a meeting of the Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group. The Group includes stakeholder representatives from libraries, journals, presses, researchers, funding agencies, and publishing service providers coming together to explore opportunities for supporting Canadian scholarly publishing.

The CALJ Annual Boot Camp is fast approaching. This year, attendees will hear from experts in social media, strategic planning, metadata, identifiers and more. Don’t miss this great opportunity for professional development and to network with your colleagues.

Mark your calendars! We’re very pleased to announce that the PKP 2017 International Scholarly Publishing Conference will be held in Montreal, Quebec on August 2, 3, and 4, 2017. The conference will co-hosted by our friends at Érudit, and will take place at the Université de Montréal. Montreal is Canada’s second largest city and has a major international airport making travel easy from most locations.

The PKP Fall 2016 Sprint was held on October 2nd and 3rd at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. As with all PKP sprints, community members joined us from across Canada and other countries – most in-person but with some remote participation. Thanks to everyone who contributed their time and expertise to make our software better for everyone.

As a community-based, not-for-profit research and software development project, we are frequently asked the question, “how can I get involved with PKP?” If that’s something you’ve been wondering about too, here are some possible answers.

PKP is currently assessing the future development of Open Conference Systems (OCS). Our focus on Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP) has resulted in less development for OCS over the past few years. We are now deciding whether to return to enhancing OCS, to continue keeping it “on hold”, or to step away from any future development completely.

The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) has recently released a new guide to best practices in licensing and attribution for scholarly publishers. The guide provides a valuable overview of the importance of licensing policies for your publishing activities, making use of Creative Commons licenses, thinking about open data, and more.

The PKP Index is growing rapidly and now contains over 170,000 items from more than 500 different sources. Using PKP’s Open Harvester System (OHS) software, the PKP Index is open to all journals, proceedings, or monographs using OJS, OCS, or OMP.